Environmental considerations have necessitated collecting used refrigerants from air conditioners and other types of cooling devices. Before these environmental considerations became important, used refrigerants were simply released into the earth's atmosphere. However, concerns over the integrity of the earth's ozone layer have produced government legislation and administrative agency regulations which require that used refrigerants be captured.
In future years, government legislation and administrative agency regulations will eventually terminate the production and thus the supply of new, but still potentially environmentally hazardous, refrigerants. It has therefore become necessary not only to capture used refrigerants but whenever possible, recycle and reclaim them. For example, such recycling and reclaiming will be extremely important for refrigerants such as R12 because approximately 140 million automobiles use R12 refrigerant in automobile air conditioners and approximately 150 million households have appliances such as refrigerators that use R12 refrigerant.
Unfortunately, those who service air conditioners and coolers that use refrigerants such as R12 do not segregate the various types of refrigerants used in different types of equipment if the refrigerants must be removed from the equipment during repair or maintenance. Rather, service personnel typically mix all types or grades of used refrigerants in a single container. Not only does this mixing of refrigerants render all the used refrigerants unusable, it also contaminates the entire mixture of used refrigerants with small solid particles of dirt or debris; liquids such as water, oil or acid; and non-condensibles such as air or nitrogen that may have been present in only one of the used refrigerants.
For used refrigerants to be recycled, reclaimed and rendered re-usable, it is necessary that the used refrigerants be decontaminated and separated; that is, they must be cleansed of any solid, liquid or gaseous contaminants and then selectively separated into pure individual refrigerants. To facilitate such recycling and reclaiming of refrigerants, it is necessary to provide a system which implements a process capable of both separating out the individual refrigerants, one from another, and also removing any solid, liquid or gaseous contaminants.